Striking the death blow to the melting pot

I've always thought one of the best American concepts was the idea of the melting pot, making us the "e pluribus unum" society. At home, we can honor our traditions, but in the public forum, we are a new, fresh society, called America. For example, as a Jew, I've been perfectly happy to accept the Americanization of, say, Christmas, which is leached of religious content and left as a generic (and beautiful) winter holiday of lights, generosity and good feeling. People of Christian faiths are free to add the religious content in their homes and churches; people of different faiths are equally free to ignore the religious content and join the fun. The melting pot promises that if people focus on certain all-American goals -- the American work ethic, the American promise of capitalism, the American idea of Democracy -- everything will shift along pretty well. The system isn't perfect, but nothing is, and there is nothing wrong with aspiring to this unifying goal, even if the goal is sometimes met more often in theory than in practice. Multiculturalism, which I'm beginning to believe is the biggest evil, the most dangerous threat, ever visited on America, has been eating away at the melting pot since it's inception in the 1960s. Its work is almost done. How else to explain what happened after an intense multiculturalism seminar, led by a lead multiculturalist, Ronald Takaki, at a high school in Marin County, California. Takaki used the occasion, not to correct historical errors, but to demand that history be rewritten entirely to remove the one, and substitute the many:

Takaki told the students that this experience [of having students at Ohio over 40 years ago ask him if he spoke English] demonstrated the imperative of teaching multiculturalism by comparing the experiences of individuals and groups.

Unsurprisingly, after indoctrination in this kind of stuff, at least one innocent student essentially voted to change America's motto to "out of one, many":

Gabe Dobbs, 16, a 12th-grader from San Rafael, said Takaki's appearance had reminded him of the importance of diversity. "I learned that America is made up of many different cultures," he said. "To try to blend them together is wrong."

I could weep.